Burke

[The Gipper]

Edmund Burke's conception of philosophical history was also fundamental to his political practice. ‘Every age has its own manners and its politicks dependent upon them’ (TCD, W & S, 1981–2015, ii 258.) The manners Burke saw around him in England were continuous with those he had seen in the middle ages, or projected backwards thither, in which a powerful executive government was balanced by other agencies with the effect of securing civil liberty. Those agencies most obvious in Burke's time had established the sovereignty of Parliament at the Glorious Revolution (1688–9), implied it in the Bill of Rights (1689), exercised it in the Act of Settlement (1701), and confirmed it by suppressing the attempts made from 1708 to 1746 to reassert the sovereignty of kings alone. Burke understood law in this arrangement as the guarantor of interests of the governed because it was law passed and secured by Parliament. It was secured in Parliament by the mutual dependence of Commons, Lords and King. That sovereignty had this public character made the British state a beneficiary of a very high degree of financial credit, and this increased the power of Parliament. The long, slow movement of British history from a conception of the realm understood as royal property to the state conceived as the expression of public will had in Burke's time reached a stage at which this will was expressed through the decisions of Parliament in a manner heavily influenced by the monarch. Burke's political activities therefore assumed parliamentary sovereignty.